Introduction

Among the features of our common humanity, yearning to explore one's surroundings and engage reality via our sensorial, perceptual and cognitive faculties finds expression across various epistemological fields. These include the arts, the invention of computing systems and the new environment of cyberspace, which we inhabit via our communication practices and, increasinlgy, via the products of our artistic and/or professional lives. Indeed, a single propulsive yearning seems to underpin the story of representational media, whether it pertains to the art of cinema or to the management of entire socio-cultural network structures: the excersise of creativity and power. Throughout the twentieth century and into the twenty-first, Italian representational arts have been marked by surges in experimental activities. Since the birth of the new medium of moving images, an increasing number of artists have converted to visual, timebased, media. From the late 1960s onward – which is the period chiefly refered to in this chapter – the activities of the CCI, Studio Monte Olimpino, Filmmaker, Videobase, Gruppo Uno, Altrementi, Sudio Azzurro and other similar initiatives, were marked by both independent and experimental endeavours. They are the historical manifestations of creative and artistic attempts to organise one's cinematic output and various forms of social impegno (engagement). Though some groups may have had a very short lifespan – the CCI lasted only about three and a half years, from 1967 to 1970 – their activities were variously documented and have reached us in the forms of diaries, memoirs, booklets, articles or essays, exhibition catalogues, photographs, recorded interviews and personal testimonies, whole films or film and video ‘fragments’. From the perspective of the social sciences, anthropology, figurative arts, history of moving-images and so forth – thus, from a much valued interdisciplinary viewpoint – the appeal and contextualisation of such histories is compelling. They were not born in a vaccum or in total isolation from the socio-cultural melieu of their times. Their historical precedents and, thus, continuum, at the level of theory and praxis, have been attested to on several occasions by historians and critics such as Antonio Costa, Bruno Di Marino, Sandro Bernardi, Marco Meneguzzo and others.